Here’s what Nick Fuentes says about Jim Crow laws and racial segregation: “It was better for them. It was better for us. It was better in general.”
The 21-year-old creator and host of the “America First” show on YouTube later claimed that he was only joking. But if you believe that, then the joke’s on you. For Fuentes, everything is “us” versus “them”: white versus black, native versus immigrant, Gentile versus Jew, straight versus gay, and man versus woman.
Conservatives must reject this noxious huckster, who has no idea what authentic American conservatism rooted in constitutional principles is all about. He is, in fact, a gift to the Left because he allows Progressives to smear Conservatives as seething, backward troglodytes.
Disavowing Fuentes means avoiding his videos and refusing to retweet his comments on social media — and also speaking out against him when we have the opportunity.
Chicago-based Fuentes gained a following after he attended the Unite the Right rally, a gathering of white nationalists in Charlottesville in 2017.
In a 2018 video with Richard Spencer, a prominent speaker at the Unite the Right event, Fuentes obsessed over racial demographics in the United States: “Even if we stopped all immigration tomorrow, because the country is, in terms of births, less than 50 percent white already, things are destined to be very different already to say the least,” Fuentes said. “It’s a very simple task for how to change that… we could very easily identify which variables have to change to reverse that situation. You have the native-born population or the white population, and you have the foreign-born population. You have to get one of these numbers to increase and one of these numbers to go down.”
It doesn’t take a woke radical to see the problem with this way of thinking. Ronald Reagan had a better sense of what made America great. He liked to quote from a letter he once received: “You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France to live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to Germany or Turkey, and you won’t become a German or a Turk. … Anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American.”
Rather than buying into the demographic determinism of Fuentes, Conservatives should embrace the optimism of Reagan.
Fuentes also traffics in Holocaust denial. Earlier this year, he compared the Nazis’ murder of Jews in gas chambers to cookies baking in an oven. As he giggled, he claimed that the Nazis had the capacity to kill only 200,000 to 300,000 people. The late historian Sir Martin Gilbert, however, wrote that the Nazis killed 6 million European Jews — and that they would have killed more but for their defeat by the Allies in World War II.
Fuentes consistently uses slurs for Jews and gay men on his show — terms that would get most Americans fired from their jobs or removed from public office.
And he’s openly against women participating in politics.
“I will continue my crusade against women in politics,” Fuentes said this summer. “Have you ever stopped and considered that maybe if you get offended, and there is such a strong and emotional reaction to political opinions you disagree with across the board, maybe that’s one of the reasons why you shouldn’t be making political decisions?”
What would Margaret Thatcher have thought of that? Maybe it’s not such a mystery. As the Iron Lady once quipped, “If you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman.”
Fuentes went on to claim that he wasn’t attacking all women, but instead “whores,” “sluts,” and “stupid, dirty bitches.” And in a video from earlier this year, called “Advice to Female Content Creators,” Fuentes said women interested in politics would be better off getting their brothers, fathers, or husbands to do the work while they cook in the kitchen.
And then there was the time when he said that because sex is always enjoyable for both parties, rape is “just so not a big deal.”
Fuentes may call himself a Conservative, but he’s not. Conservatism is grounded the laws of nature and nature’s God. Only within this framework can people accept the rights and responsibilities of citizens within a polity, including the establishment and defense a government that protects the rights and freedoms of individuals to think and speak for themselves.
Race and sex have nothing to do with it. We’re all created equal.
Conservatives shouldn’t just distance themselves from Fuentes. We should fight against his perverse vision. It’s us against him.
Alex Nester is a senior studying economics and is the Opinions editor for The Collegian.